8-25-2014

8-25-2014

Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 13:07:54 +0800
Subject: The week of work
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!!

This week has gone by pretty well, working hard and finding new people, and seeing blessings because of it.

This last week was the first week of the Move call and so there were a bunch of new faces to be seen in the district, however of the 4 companions in the district me and my companion were the only ones that stayed the same where the other 3 got a new companion.  It has been interesting getting to know all of the new missionaries that have arrived as well as just being able to do the work here.

This week started off pretty good, on Tuesday we didn't really have very many lessons and so we decided to head up to one of the more northern parts of our mission and try a little bit of tracting to see what we could find. After that we met 3-4 different cool families that said we could probably come back and share a message with them, so that was cool.  Later that week we were able to visit with one of them and talk a little bit about how the gospel has blessed our families. It was a good lesson though they personally didn't have much interest at that time.

Later in the week though we had a lot of lessons planned to meet with a lot of new people, and were able to meet with a couple of really cool guys, one was a man that goes by Keanu a nice guy that likes to workout as well as go swimming.  However he told us while we were meeting with him that he wanted to meet with us because he had seen some of his other "Christian Friends" change and just have a better attitude about life and so he wanted to see if church is what made that change.  He was a super prepared guy and Hopefully we can get him prepared to be baptized in the coming weeks.  

The other guy that we met is a cool guy called Mr. Dai who runs a pet store of sorts, it was a very interesting first visit, as we went to his house and discovered that he already had 2 of our "no success can compensate for failure in the home" stickers hanging around the house and we were really curious as to where he got those.  He had told us that he met missionaries before but we didn't think much of it at that time.  We started teaching him the first lesson, however it was hard to keep focused as his house was full of just random animals (he had 4 different birds, a big dog, a couple of spiders and some other animals) so our lesson got cut a little short but he was really willing to listen and just talk about his life and his thoughts.

Now for the coolest thing that happened this week, it happened on Saturday night, there was a small concert that was sponsored by the church where they had a member of the church from Hawaii come over and play the piano for all of us to hear.  It was a super cool event especially considering who the person was. you can check out who by just clicking on this short Mormon message right here.

https://www.lds.org/youth/video/kuhaos-extraordinary-gift?lang=eng

Anyway thats about it for what happened to me this week.  Hopefully you are all having a great week and I will talk to you guys next week!!!

Love you all!

8-18-2014

8-18-2014

Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 14:44:30 +0800
Subject: Move call has arrived. Another misionary down.
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!!

this week has gone by pretty well. As we were in a 3-some with an Elder from another area, we learned that his area was pretty much our area for the week and so we wanted to spend the week trying to visit some of the furthest places in our area, it went quite well and to finish the week we not only had a baptism of a happy go lucky little girl but we also had stake conference.  Lots of fun to be had and more to be made =)

First of all as we started the week, we learned that Taiphoon season has really started, as I think two different ones simultaneously hit Taiwan and there was TONS of rain for the whole first half of the week, in fact on Tuesday we normally do our "English class proselyting" where we take one hour and just tell people about or English class and invite them to come to that, however this week as we were our handing out the fliers and talking to people, the rain was coming down so hard that all of our fliers were just kind of coming apart and the ink started to bleed off of the fliers till they were nothing but long white rectangles.  It was kind of funny but also kind of annoying all at the same time.

Next on Wednesday we didn't really have anything set up and so we decided to go to the furthest area in our newly acquired area, an area that goes so far down south that is actually is considered Kaohsiung rather than Tainan, but we decided to do it. However as wee were going there disaster struck, we were biking down a patch of road next to the ocean, really nice view, and we hear this really loud POP, next thing I know I'm riding on a flat tire, and we are scrambling to find a bike store who can replace it for us cheaply.  It was kind of a downer but we got it fixed fast enough to continue with most of our plans, just not the trip to Kaohsiung.

Next big thing that happened was last Friday we had the awesome baptism.  We had it on friday because Saturday and Sunday would both be part of the whole stake conference, and nobody (especially the bishop) would have been able to come, so we got it all done on Friday and things turned out pretty well.

And finally to end the week we had a really cool stake conference where there were a lot of cool speakers, including a missionary who had just returned from the Temple Square mission, our mission president President Blickenstaff, and a person from Hong Kong who spoke some Cantonese for us to hear, it was a really cool thing to listen to and I loved a small example that he gave us a cool example by showing us two Chinese characters, one was 盲 the other was 忙 the first one is pronounced "Mang" with the bottom half of the character being another character that means "Eye" and the top being a character meaning "dead" so put it together and the character means "Blind" now if you look at the other character the right half of the character is the same as the top of the first character which means "dead" and the left half of the character is another character that means "heart" it is also pronounced "Mang" and it means busy, so he explained that if we are too busy for spiritual things then it is as if our hearts are dead.  and so to always try to have some free time and be available to receive revelation.

That is pretty much it for me though, Hope that you all have a great next week!

Love you all!

Elder Heaton

何長老

8-11-2014

8-11-2014

Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 11:48:51 +0800
Subject: the week of finding!
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!

This week has gone really well, we had an invite from our Mission President this week for every single companionship in the mission to find at least 3 new investigators, accompanying this invite was another one to study PMG chapter 9 each week which focuses on finding and to make sure that you have contacting/tracting time every day.  It was a pretty good week we saw a ton of miracles this week because of it.

The week started off with us going to our ZTM and having a great training on talking with everybody as well as focusing on the blessings of finding people to teach.  It was an interesting start to the week and we got all of our invites from there.  After that it was onto the streets to find some cool people.  However by the end of Tuesday we didn't really have any new investigators to speak of.  The next day however we started the day with some tracting to see who we could find. We went to a random neighborhood and just started knocking around and found a small family with two kids about middle school age.  We taught them a lesson, set up another time to meet with them and it was good.

However our week was in for a bit of a change that night.  Was we were getting home we received a call from the assistants.  They were telling us that one of the nearby companionship's who had a short-term missionary working with him, would have to be split up because the missionary was going home that night. So we went and brought him up to our apartment and became a 3-some until the end of this transfer.  Kind of a twist on things but it makes our numbers jump a bit so its super cool. 

Finally to end our week one of our investigators, a 9 year old little girl, got her baptismal interview this last Saturday and so this coming Friday we will be having a baptismal service for her.  It was super fun being able to teach her, although a little different, because you have to really be able to teach clearly so that they understand the points that you are talking about.  I loved being able to meet with her and will send you some pictures next week =)

Well thats about it for this week, I hope that everyone at home is doing well and that things are just going great!

Have a great week!

8-4-2014

8-4-2014

Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2014 11:23:08 +0800
Subject: The work keeps moving forward
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello the family!

This week has been going well, we are still working hard on finding but now as we are finding more and more people to work with we are able to spend a little more time teaching and that's always good =)  We have a couple of really cool people that I am excited to be working with and we are just doing our best to keep everyone that we are meeting with progressing.

This week I think one of the coolest things that happened was that about 2 weeks ago we got a referral from a member, they said that there was a family in the ward who had a little girl that had just turned 9 and had not been baptized yet, and once someone turns 9 it becomes the missionaries responsibility to teach them the lessons as get them baptized.  This week we were able to meet with them and she is just a super cute little girl just having fun.  She had pretty much grown up in the church so she knows pretty much everything that she needs to, we just have to review them to make sure that she is ready.  But it was cool to see that even at 9 years old, people are still able to understand the whole doctrine of Christ and to be able to make educated and informed answers about all of the points of the gospel.  But she should be able to be baptized in about 2 weeks.

Other than that though theirs not too much new stuff to report, we have been eating with quite a few interesting things.  If you look at the pictures, one of the members in the ward made us an interesting lunch.  He used to own a breakfast shop and so he knows quite a lot about cooking things, so he made us all some hamburgers as well as a cool toast dessert things.  It was quite delicious and we had a great chat with him afterwards about his conversion story and to see just how he met the missionaries.

Well Things are going pretty well here and all in all I can say that I am pleased with the progress that we have made in the area.  The mission is having a big push right now to make sure that every companionship in the mission is able to find 3 new investigators this week and wants it to the point that is a companionship has not hit the goal by around Thursday he wants nearby companionships to come to their area and help them find some people.  It will sure be an interesting week, but all to be able to accomplish our missionary purpose.

Thats pretty much my week, hope that you all have a great one!

Love you all!